The remarkably un-connotated and long-established space of the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna was host to the the “in awe” exhibition which ran from October until November of this year. The exhibition spread throughout the space with slacking shapes and lying limbs, hung from walls and in shelve systems. With excerpts from their current productions, some artists would let curator Melanie Ohnemus select the protagonists for her interrelational formations, others decided to make paintings or objects especially for this occasion, or intervened in performative ways.

In a general pull to one corner of the space, the assembly of the artworks disclosed an antagonistic development of figuration and posed questions towards ideas of refinement. Joining two important influences of her career, namely the art scenes of Frankfurt am Main, Germany and Vienna, Austria, the curator opted for being highly subjective in her approach. In terms of installation though the contributions were managed poignantly. The show offered a carelessness in spite of stylish or programmatic exhibition-making that might overwrite exhibits themselves by their thematic overburdening.

The Dissidents, a graphic piece on shrill yellow cotton paper by Lisa Holzer, the only item placed on the wall to the right seen from the entrance, set an intuitional tone with its abstract movement. Being a blown-up photographic image depicting the inside of a chips bag, it is accompanied by one of her quotes, this time around power and puke. Lena Henke’s black fiberglass figure, which was placed in a manner of welcoming the viewer into the left drift, introduced an almost undefinable drapery balancing precariously on three kinds of male deodorants. This horseless saddle turned it’s back on Josefin Granqvist’s crudely made tiny ceramic shelve holding a stone she had retrieved from a lake nearby her Swedish home. Being one of two shrines mounted to each short side of a wall-module in the middle of the room, they were inducing a kind of enchanted moment into the situation. Describing these three assemblages may outline a reluctance towards definition and an impulse against a binary mode of thought that was inherently felt in this balancing act of an art exhibition.